Odinn's Child (38 page)

EIGHTEEN

I
MADE ONLY
one real friend among my fellow novices in the two years I spent at St Ciaran's. Colman had been sent there by his father, a prosperous farmer. Apparently the farmer had prayed to St Ciaran for relief when a severe cattle murrain had affected his herd. As a remedy he had smeared his sick animals with a paste made from earth scraped from the floor of the saint's oratory. When the cattle all recovered, the farmer was so grateful that he enrolled the lad — the least promising of his six sons — with the monks as a thank offering for the saint's beneficial intervention. Solid and reliable, Colman stood by me when the other novices, jealous that I outshone them in the classroom, ganged up to bully me about my own alien origins. I repaid Coleman's loyalty by helping him with his studies — he was something of a plodder when it came to book learning — and the two of us made an effective team when it came to breaking the bounds of monastic discipline.

Our dormitory huts were situated on the northern side of the monastery grounds, and at night the bolder ones among us would sometimes scramble over the monastery bank to see what the outside world was like. Slinking among the houses that had grown up around St Ciaran's, we watched from the shadows how ordinary people lived, eavesdropped on quarrels and conversations heard through the thin walls of their dwellings, listened to the cries of babies, the drinking songs and the snores. We were discreet because there were townsfolk who would report our presence to the abb if they saw us. When that happened the punishment was harsh. Spending three or four hours flat on your face on the earth floor reciting penances was the least of it. Worse was to be made to stand with your arms outstretched as a living cross until the joints creaked with pain, supervised by one of the more callous senior brothers, while reciting, over and over again, 'I beseech pardon of God,' 'I believe in the Trinity,' 'May I receive mercy.' Little mercy was available. One of the novices, reported for the second time for a nocturnal excursion, received two hundred lashes with a scourge.

A short walk from the monastery was a small stone-built chapel, sheltering in a wood. No one knew who had built it there or why. The monks at St Ciaran's denied any knowledge of its origins. The place was nothing to do with them, and they never went there. The little chapel was abandoned and falling into disrepair and housed, as we discovered, a hidden attraction. Which novice first found the lewd sculpture, I do not know. It must have been someone with remarkably sharp eyesight, for the carved stone was tucked away among the stones forming the entry to the chapel, and under normal circumstances it would have been invisible. Whoever found the carving mentioned it to his friends and they in turn passed on the knowledge to other students, so that it became a sort of talisman. We called the stone the Sex Hag, and most of us, at some stage, crept down to the chapel to gaze at it. The carving was as grotesque as any of the strange and leering beasts which appeared in our illuminations. It showed a older and naked woman, with three pendulous breasts sagging from a rugged rib-cage. She was seated with her legs apart and knees open, facing the observer. With her hands she was pulling apart the lips of her private entry and on her face was a seraphic smile. The effect was both erotic and demonic.

Of course, there was a good deal of salacious talk inspired by the Sex Hag's revelations, but for the most part it was ignorant speculation as we had few occasions to meet any women. Indeed the frightening posture of the Sex Hag acted as a deterrent. Several of the novices were so disturbed and repelled by the graphic quality of the carving that I doubt they ever touched a woman thereafter.

The same cannot be said for me. I was intensely curious about the opposite sex and spent a good deal of time trying to devise a way of striking up an acquaintance with a female of my own age. This was well-nigh impossible. Our community was all male, and our only regular women visitors were those who came from the nearby settlement to visit the infirmary or to offer prayers at the various oratories. Unfortunately they seldom included anyone who was youthful and nubile. Sometimes a young and unmarried woman was glimpsed among the pilgrims who came to St Ciaran's shrine, and we younger monks would gaze in fascination, telling ourselves there was nothing wrong in our curiosity because the temptation was only momentary as the pilgrims would linger just a few hours, then vanish out of our lives for ever.

It was Brother Ailbe the librarian who, unwittingly, provided me with the long-desired chance to meet a female of my own age. Our keeper of books was so solicitous about the well-being of the precious volumes that he wrapped all the important books in lengths of linen, then stored them in individual leather satchels to protect them from harm. One day he decided that the satchel which contained St Ciaran's own copy of the Bible — the same book which had been paraded before Donnachad on the day I was handed over to the monastery as a slave — needed attention. For any other book in his library Brother Ailbe would have ordered a replacement satchel from the best leather-worker in the town, sending a note with the necessary dimensions of the volume and waiting for the finished satchel to be delivered. But in this case the existing satchel was something very special. It was claimed that St Ciaran himself had sewn the satchel. So there was no question of throwing it away and ordering a new one. Yet the existing satchel was so shabby that it did no honour to the saint's memory, and there was an ugly rip in the leather that cut right across the faint marks which, it was said, were the fingerprints of the saint himself.

Brother Ailbe decided to entrust the repair to a craftsman living in the town, a man by the name of Bladnach, who was a master of the long blind stitch. In this technique the needle, instead of passing straight through the leather, is turned and runs along within the thickness of the skin to emerge some distance away from where it entered so that the thread itself is invisible. But using a long blind stitch on old and brittle leather is a risk. There is only one opportunity to run the needle in. There can be no second chance, no withdrawing the point and trying again, as this destroys the original substance. Yet this is how Brother Ailbe wanted St Ciaran's satchel to be mended so that it would appear to the uneducated eye that the satchel had never been damaged. Bladnach was the only craftsman capable of the work.

Bladnach was a cripple. Born without the full use of his legs, he moved about his workroom on his knuckles, though with remarkable agility. This way of motion had, of course, developed the strength and thickness of his arms and shoulders to an extraordinary degree, and this- was no disadvantage for a man who needs all his power to drive a needle through heavy, stiff leather. But Bladnach's disability also meant that it was more logical for Brother Ailbe to bring the damaged book satchel to Bladnach's workshop than for Bladnach to be carried to the monastery each day to make the repairs. Yet St Ciaran's bible satchel was so precious that Ailbe could not possibly leave it unguarded. The librarian's solution was to ask Abb Aidan for permission for someone from the monastery to accompany the satchel to Bladnach's workshop and stay with it until the repair was done. By that time I was a familiar figure in the library, reading my texts, and Brother Ailbe suggested that I would make a suitable envoy. Abb Aidan agreed and stipulated that I was not to live in the leather-worker's house but to live, eat and sleep within the workshop itself, not allowing the satchel out of my sight.

Neither our abb nor our librarian were aware that when it comes to the sewing of the very finest leather, the most elegant stitching of delicate lambskin or the threading of a single twist of flax so fine that you cannot use a needle to insert it but make the merest pinprick of a hole, the work is almost invariably done by a woman. In the case of Bladnach the work was done by his daughter, Orlaith.

How can I describe Orlaith? Even after all these years I feel a slight tightening sensation in my throat as I remember her. She was sixteen and as fine-boned and delicately formed as any woman I have ever seen. Her face was of the most exquisite shape, where delicate cheekbones emphasised the slight hollows of the cheeks themselves and the gentle sweep of her jaw led to a small and perfect chin. She had a short, straight nose, a flawless mouth and the most enormous dark brown eyes. Her hair was chestnut, yet you could mistake it for being black, and it made an almost unreal contrast with her pale skin. By any standards she was a truly beautiful woman, and she took meticulous care with her appearance. I never saw her with a hair out of place or wearing a garment that was not perfectly cleaned and pressed and selected for its colours. But the strangest thing of all is that, when I first laid eyes on her, I did not think her beautiful. I was shown into her father's workshop, where she sat at her bench stitching a woman's belt, and I barely gave her a second glance. I utterly failed to appreciate her stunning beauty. She seemed almost ordinary. Yet within a day I was captivated by her. There was something about the fragile grace in the curve of her forearm as she leaned forward to take up a thread of flax, or the flowing subtlety of her body as she rose to her feet and walked across the room, which had me in thrall. She stepped as delicately as a fawn.

She was in the early bloom of her womanhood and responsive to my admiration. She was also, as I later understood, in despair for a private reason and that made her all the more alert to the chance of happiness. There was little that either of us could do during those first few days to progress our feelings. It took her father a week to mend the precious satchel, most of the time being spent applying coat after coat of warmed wool grease to soften and restore the desiccated leather. There was nothing for me to do but sit in the workroom, watching father and daughter at their work, trying to make myself useful in small ways. When Orlaith left the room for any reason, the room seemed to lose its colour and turn lifeless, and I would ache for her return just to be close to her, sensing her presence so powerfully that it was almost as if we were in physical contact. Two or three times we managed to speak to one another, awkward, shy words, each of us stumbling and mumbling, sentences fading away and left unfinished, both of us fearful of making a mistake. But these stilted conversations were only possible when Bladnach was out of the room, which happened rarely as it was a great effort for him to swing on his knuckles, hauling his useless lower limbs as he left the workshop to go to relieve himself. All three of us took our meals together, Orlaith fetching the food from her mother's cooking fire. We would sit in the workroom, eating in quiet, shared company, and I am sure that Bladnach was alert to what was happening between his daughter and myself, but he chose to ignore it. I suspect that he too wanted his daughter to have some happiness in her life. With his own disability he knew how to value any small chance that occurred.

When the satchel was repaired, Bladnach sent word to the monastery, and our librarian came down to collect the precious relic. As Brother Ailbe and I walked back to the monastery, my heart was close to bursting. On that last morning Orlaith had whispered a suggestion that we try to meet a week later. She had grown up around St Ciaran's, where all the sharp-eyed children knew about the novice monks and how they came out at nights to spy on the community. So she proposed that we meet at a certain spot outside the monastery vallum a week later, soon after nightfall. She thought that she could slip quietly out of the house and she would be free for an hour or two, if I could meet her there. This first tryst was to become a defining moment in my lifetime's memories. It was a night in early spring and there were a few stars and enough light from a sliver of new moon for me to see her standing in the darker pool of shadow cast by an ash tree. I approached, trembling slightly, aware even of the scent given off by her clothing. She reached out and touched my hand in the darkness and gently drew me towards her. It was the most natural, most marvellous and most tender moment that I could ever have imagined. To hold her, to feel her warmth, the yielding softness of her flesh and the wondrous life and structure of her fine bones within my arms was a sensation that made me dizzy with elation.

For the next weeks I felt as if I was sleep-walking through my daily routines of prayer and lessons, the sessions in the scriptorium and the hours spent labouring in the fields. My thoughts dwelt constantly on Orlaith. She was everywhere. I placed her in a thousand imaginary situations, speculating on her gestures, her words, her presence. And when I came back to reality, it was only to calculate where she was at that particular moment, what she was doing, and how long it might be before I held her in my arms again. My trust in Odinn, which had begun to falter among so much Christian fervour, came surging back. I asked myself who else but Odinn could have arranged such a wondrous development in my life. Odinn, among all the Gods, understood the yearnings of the human heart. He it was who rewarded those who fell in battle with the company of beautiful women in Valholl.

I should have been more wary. Odinn's gifts, as I knew full well, often conceal a bitter core.

Our love affair lasted nearly four months before catastrophe arrived. Every one of our clandestine meetings produced intoxicating happiness. They were preceded by a giddy sense of anticipation, then followed by a numbing glow of fulfilment. Our meetings became all we lived for. Nothing else mattered. Sometimes, returning through the darkness from the tryst, I found it difficult to keep walking in a straight line. It was not the darkness which confused me, but the physical sense of being so happy. Of course, the three companion novices who shared our sleeping hut noticed my nighttime excursions. At first they said nothing, but after a couple of weeks there were some approving and slightly wistful comments, and I knew there was little risk of betrayal from that direction. My friend Colman stood by me one night, when an older monk noticed